It's that time of year again. Reuters has released their Pictures of the Year 2007.

There is some amazing work in this collection but at least a couple images I would describe as "disturbing" because of the gore or violence contained in them. So consider yourself warned if you're easily disturbed by violence and its aftereffects.

The Los Angeles Times has a moving story about the impact a single photograph on both the subject and the photographer and the connection it forged between them.

Times photographer Luis Sinco made James Blake Miller an emblem of the war. The image would change both of their lives and connect them in ways neither imagined.

When the series "A New Dawn? A Kentucky Mother's Struggle Through Drug Court" is published starting this coming Sunday in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and as it goes live on the newspaper's Web site as a multimedia package, it will represent four years of work by photojournalist and NPPA member David Stephenson and reporter Mary Meehan as they followed a drug addict's struggle to get clean after she was sentenced to treatment - not prison time - in drug court.

This series looks terribly interesting and intense. Being just across the state in Louisville I won't have any issue finding the hard copy of the paper but I can't wait to see the multimedia package as well. This past year seemed to have been full of stories where photojournalist did or were accused of doing wrong (deceptive practices in photo manipulation, etc) it's a treat to be reminded (though we shouldn't have forgotten) that great, important photojournalism is out there.

via NPPA

Lexington Herald-Leader photographer Mark Cornelison has a nice little video up about shooting athletes. In it he talks a little about his setup and his style for making athletes look cool. The video is made even cooler because it features the quarterbacks for Kentucky's two major university football teams, including my beloved Louisville Cardinals.

via Strobist

The Chicago Police Department is investigating allegations that an officer seized and damaged a Tribune photographer's cameras Monday night at the scene of a police-involved shooting that turned into an unruly public demonstration.

The story goes on to say that the officer intentionally knocked one camera out of the photographer's hand and threw a second camera down the street while the photographer was covering a fatal shooting, by police, of a teenager.

Photography is not a crime people. Not even photographing the police. How far are we going to ride this circle before we start coming back the other way again?

National Press Photographers Association has a nice feature about student photojournalist Andrew Worrall, the 19 year old freshman to be at the University of Missouri at Columbia's media convergence program, who shot some very compelling images of the Minneapolis bridge collapse yesterday. He was on his way to a Minnesota twins game when he heard about the collapse on the radio. He had some gear and his high school press pass with him and got into the thick of things.

A full day after the bridge first fell, Worrall was asked what he thinks about Wednesday's experience in retrospect. "It really pushes my ethics; it's definitely hard to shoot people suffering and tragedy in general. But I'm happy if I can make the world a better place by sharing my vision through my lens."

CNET has a very interesting interview with Neal Krawetz, founder of computer security firm Hacker Factor. Of late Krawetz has turned his attention to digital images and the truths and lies they tell. This is particularly interesting to me in a journalism context.

Take USA Today. Every now and again, they put up pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And they will modify the pictures. I'm not sure who's modifying the pictures--whether it's the photographer submitting it or the intern who's putting them together or someone else at USA Today--but they'll modify it to increase the brightness, for example, on Hillary.

When you increase brightness on a picture, you bring out all the things like wrinkles that really aren't attractive. And they'll soften the picture on Barack Obama to make it look better.

And on helping publications avoid "modified" images.

In my talk, I actually give some pointers for the mass media like Reuters. If they really want to publish pictures that have been unmodified, here's how you can tell. One way is to use quantization table fingerprinting.

If the picture claims to be from a digital camera, and the quantization tables, which are used for compressing the image, don't match the camera, then you know that it's been manipulated. If Reuters had done that, it would have caught the fake photos.

Of course virtually every digital image, just like every darkroom developed image, is going to have some level of modification and manipulation. Burning, dodging, contrast, etc.. The question for me in terms of photojournalism is does it alter the fundamental truth and story of the photo. Photoshopping out a power line crosses that line between truth and fiction for me whereas upping the contrast a bit doesn't. I don't envy the photo editors that have to draw that line between truth and fiction but the lines do have to be drawn. As we've discussed before there are just too many instances of photographers in photojournalism situations taking huge leaps over that truth/fiction line to ignore the problem.

I don't know how I missed this story for a year but I did:

One year after his arrest, an Associated Press photographer is still being held at a prison camp in Iraq by U.S. military officials who have neither formally charged him with a crime nor made public any evidence of wrongdoing.

National Press Photographers Association has an interesting article about Alan Kim, the photographer for The Roanoke Times whose photographs from Virginia Tech have become, I think, the most used and seen photographs from Monday's events.

via Rob Galbraith

There is no doubt that everyone was operating under a state of hyper alertness and suspicion on the Virginia Tech campus on Monday after the tragic events there. Given those events and the environment it's perhaps understandable that police arrested and held Shaozhuo Cui, photo editor for the Virginia Tech student newspaper, on the grounds that as a young man of Asian descent he was a "suspect matching the profile" of the shooter that had been described to police. Even Cui finds it understandable

"I can't blame authorities for any of their actions, and I certainly understand that they need to do what they feel is best in a dangerous situation."

What isn't understandable though is why the police, even after they cleared and released Cui, are still holding on to his equipment. His camera, camera bag, media cards and the images they contain and even his IDs are still being held, as of Tuesday April 17, by the police.

"But as a student journalist, I don't feel it's appropriate that authorities continue to hold my camera and my work without any further explanation."

Obviously deepest thoughts and sympathies go out to the entire Virginia Tech community. That being said this is a story worth following and paying attention to. The student photojournalist did nothing wrong and he deserves access to his equipment and his images. Even in the darkest times we can't ignore cases of journalists being silenced either through force, or in this case by keeping images away from the photographer who captured them.

via PhotoAttorney

Original Story: Student photographer detained during Virginia Tech crisis, equipment confiscated

Update: More details from the photographer at Collegiate Times